Video Transcript

I mentioned earlier how many characters are a combination of slender delicate parts and broad parts. And how it's often necessary to create separate lighting for each, so that you don't have say the same soft lighting contours on the fingers as you do on a big, fat belly or something. Cut-out character rigs typically have complex networks. But to avoid things going from crazy to ridiculous, the key is to organize main groups with their own lighting.

So for this character, the hands definitely needed their own lighting, cause there's skinny fingers and slender. But all the other limb segments: upper arm, forearms, shin and thighs, could all share with the one common lighting group, cause they're all kind of similar widths. The torso and head have their own separate lighting setups too. And there's just a carving patch on the face to inset those eyes a bit.

Now one thing, it isn't really a problem with this setup, but let me just illustrate with this other Normal Map I've prepared for the limbs. So with this particular Normal Map, you can see that the limb segments are showing up.

The way to fix this is to set all the limb composites to Pass Through mode. This ensures that the light is applied to the whole limb, rather than the segments individually.

Also in this example, if we pan down and move the Light to a low position. You can see that the character's feet have this unwanted under light, so I want to fix that. By adding a patch of colour and setting its Modelling Override to 100, those parts of the feet are better lit.

Remember that using carving patches like this, you can fix a number of lighting issues.

And as explained in the previous video, I've added this colour patch to its own sublayer, to keep it separate from the main drawing.

And that concludes this series on the new Volumetric Lighting features in Toon Boom Harmony Premium.

I am still Adam Phillips and I wish you the best of luck with your own lighting effects.